Google Play Movies and TV Gets Live Channel for Trailers

Google has a lot of media content, although it may be hard to know exactly what to watch. This is something that has been a focus on Android TV at its core. The recommendtions row allows any app to add specific pieces of content for the viewer. However, what if you could take that a step further and fully incentivize users to consume more of your content? This is something that Hollywood has been doing for decades through trailers, teasing users and getting them excited.

Some users have now been reporting that Google Play Movies and TV has a Live Channel. It currently appears to be a server-side switch, and so you may not see this even with the latest version of the app. This channel is something we’ve known was coming for a few months. A changelog from December stated:

What’s New?

* Wishlist any movie that’s not yet available for purchase and receive notifications when it’s available to buy or rent
* More reliable playback
* Settings improvements
* Play Movies & TV channel in Android TV Live Channels app

Reddit user hosemaster provided a few screenshots of the channel. It appears to showcase a number of trailers from Google’s most popular movies. Opening up the UI shows users a button that they can press to immediately go to Google Play and rent the movie. It’s a pretty clever way to showcase content, although it would be even better if they could add a second channel which just streams content from your library so you can binge on a TV show.

Another user in this thread stated the Live Channel only appears on the Nexus Player, perhaps indicating some sort of Android N API that is being used.

Are you seeing this channel appear? Did you do anything special? Let us know in the comments below.

Nick Felker is a student Electrical & Computer Engineering student at Rowan University (C/O 2017) and the student IEEE webmaster. When he's not studying, he is a software developer for the web and Android (Felker Tech). He has several open source projects on GitHub (http://github.com/fleker)
Devices: Moto G-2013 Moto G-2015, Moto 360, Google ADT-1, Nexus 7-2013 (x2), Lenovo Laptop, Custom Desktop.
Although he was an intern at Google, the content of this blog is entirely independent and his own thoughts.